Henrik Rydéhn

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Spring 2019 I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation In Virtue Of -- Determination, Dependence, and Metaphysically Opaque Grounding at Uppsala University.

Since then I have worked as a teacher and researcher at Uppsala and the University of Tübingen in Germany. From 2022 to 2025 I am the beneficiary of a research grant from the Alexander von Humboldt foundation.

For the fall 2023/24 and spring 2024 semesters I will be working as a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at Uppsala.

My area of specialization is metaphysics, but I am interested in a wide variety of philosophical issues, particularly in metaethics, the philosophy of language and normative ethics. In metaphysics, my work has come more and more to revolve around the core structural concepts of metaphysics, like grounding, essence, dependence, fundamentality, modality, and others.

My dissertation In Virtue Of -- Determination, Dependence, and Metaphysically Opaque Grounding is a contribution to the study of grounding. Grounding is the relation that is increasingly thought to underlie certain explanations in philosophy (and beyond) where "in virtue of" or "because" talk is employed. We might, for example, think that a particular action is morally wrong because it inflicts unnecessary harm, or that a certain glass is brittle (i.e. disposed to shatter if struck) in virtue of its having a certain microstructure. But explanations like these seem to differ in certain ways from causal explanations, e.g. in sometimes not concerning physical things or facts and by being temporally instantaneous (rather than holding between an earlier event and a later one, as in the case of causation). Considerations like these have lead many philosophers in the grounding literature to call grounding a relation of "non-causal determination".

My dissertation deals with various questions about how to best understand grounding, as well as how it relates to other central metaphysical concepts. For a more detailed abstract of the dissertation, click here.